Author Archives: Bronson O'Quinn

About Bronson O'Quinn

Bronson is the Blog Editor for Accents Publishing. He finds any excuse to write, whether it's for someone's blog or a flash fiction contest. He likes starting projects. He hopes to one day finish them.

K. Nicole Wilson’s This Temple from Finishing Line Press

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K. Nicole Wilson has been published in & Grace, Circe’s Lament, This Wretched Vessel, and Her Limestone Bones. Wilson’s newest chapbook, This Temple, is, according to her, “a book of poems about the body and the heart, and contemplations on both the metaphorical and physical deaths of each.”

Accents Founder, Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, says:

In “This Temple” K Nicole Wilson masterfully marries the rhythm and music of language with the memorable images of pain. These kinetic poems are alive with truth and emotion. The readers feel the energy of each knot in both flesh and psyche, the buildup of tension between fear of death and the welcoming of death’s seeming relief. Relationships and expectations are explored and broken open to heal in the air of the words. The collection begins and ends with the heart – a place where beginnings and endings live together in beauty and poetry. Congratulations to K Nicole for a wonderful debut collection!

This Temple is released on September 9th, 2016, but advanced sales run until the end of the day July 15th.

Update: The original post incorrectly listed the pre-order deadline as July 14th.

LexPoMo 2016 Writing Challenge Stats

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This has been the best Lexington Poetry Month yet, and we can’t express how grateful we are to have such an amazing community of supportive and talented poets. We also can’t say enough good things about our sponsors, Apex Publications and The Morris Book Shop, and how much of a blessing they have been to the local writing community as well as their specific communities at large. Thank you so much!

Below are some numbers.

156 poets registered for the event
Together, we posted 1,542 poems during the Writing Challenge
We commented 3,485 times on people’s poems
We had 8% more views than last year
2,583 people came to our site from Facebook
Of our overall audience, 99% came from the United States
Of our international audience,
- 15% came from the United Kingdom
- 13% came from Bulgaria
- 12% came from Canada

Once again, thank you so much for your support, and please sign up for our mailing list for information on new releases and important news from Accents Publishing!

LexPoMo Writing Challenge: Bonus Day

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Dear Poets,

Due to overwhelming demand (and a couple technical snafus on my part), the Lexington Poetry Month 2016 Writing Challenge will continue through July 1st! If you were unable to post a poem near the deadline on June 30th, please go ahead and post. If you are excited at having another day to write a poem, please do! If you are outraged at technology, write about that. Just know that, no matter how you spend the LexPoMo Bonus Day, we are grateful to have you.

And on a more personal note, I want to thank everyone who has contributed as well as everyone who has let me know of any problems they’ve had. You are the best bunch of poets I’ve ever known and it is because of you that Lexington Poetry Month happens in the first place.

Kentucky Great Writers: Jay McCoy, Jason, Howard, Gwyn Hyman Rubio

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Jay McCoy, author of The Occupation (Accents Publishing), will be one of the featured speakers at tonight’s Kentucky Great Writers event along with Jason Howard and Gwyn Human Rubio.

The poems of The Occupation deal with homosexual relationships and the threat of HIV. Jay McCoy instructs the class “Writing for Recovery” at the NAMI Participation Station in Lexington, Kentucky. He is a Lexington-based poet and visual artist with deep roots in Eastern Kentucky as well as the general manager for the Morris book shop and co-founder of the Teen Howl Poetry Series.

Jason Howard‘s writings have spanned the careers of such musicians as Carly Simon, Dwight Yoakam, Ricky Skaggs, Jim James, and Jean Ritchie. A Few Honest Words: The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music (University Press of Kentucky) explores the many genres in which Kentucky musicians have helped contribute, from folk and jazz to hip hop and gospel.

Because Gwyn Hyman Rubio‘s father, a writer, had a fatal heart attack at 39, she stayed away from the profession as long as she could. In 1983, she realized her calling and was accepted into the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College. Her writing tends to explore human relationships, especially those of children and parets. Love and Ordinary Creatures (Ashland Creek Press) is from the perspective of a cockatoo and explores the bird’s relationship with his caretaker.

Open mic sign-ups start at 6:30pm with readings at 7. Featured guests begin at 7:30.

Visit the Facebook Event page for more info.

When:	Tuesday, May 24, 2016 @ 7PM
Where:	The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning
	251 W. Second Street
	Lexington, KY 40507
	(859) 254-4175

“What’s the Ocean for” by Petja Heinrich

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if there is nobody

to contemplate it
to lick its salt and to bring back
the discarded whales

to be vulnerable and small

to be swept with a single wind gust
a single wave to cover it whole
and carry it away

what is it for
if there is nobody

the ocean hangs on your little finger

–Петя Хайнрих
(Petja Heinrich),
translated from the Bulgarian
by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer,
The Season of Delicate Hunger
(Accents Publishing)

Petja Heinrich was born on October 4th, 1973 in Sofia. She holds a degree in journalism from St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia. She translates poetry from German into Bulgarian and has contributed to various German and Bulgarian publications. Petja is the founder of poetry print journal But Poetry, and she frequently blogs at mislidumi.de. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Fly Up and Catch Us (2012). She lives in Düsseldorf, Germany. She is a biker who talks with birds.

Kentucky Writers Day 2016

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Lori meadows, Executive Director for the Kentucky Arts Council gave the opening remarks for Kentucky Writers’ Day on April 25th, 2016.

Below are videos of the other readers, three of which are poets published by Accents and all of which are Poet Laureates of Kentucky.

Continue reading →

LexPoMo 2016 Writing Challenge Sign Ups Are Open, plus 2015 Book Release

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Dear Lexington poets,

The signups for the Lexington Poetry Month 2016 Writing Challenge are currently open!

Please click here to sign up. If you signed up last year, then you will have the option to send yourself an email to register for this year.

Also, everyone is invited to our release party for & Grace: selections from Lexington Poetry Month 2015, which will be tonight at the Carnegie Center in Lexington, Kentucky next to Gratz Park. (If you will need parking, you may come early and get a pass from the front desk to park at a neighboring Transylvania lot).

If you are coming to the event and you participated in last year’s event, then you are invited to come and read your piece in front of a live audience. Refreshments will be served.

We hope you join us for this year’s challenge, and please come celebrate with us tonight!

Accents Update: Frank X Walker

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Just in time for the Derby, NPR ran a piece by Frank X Walker about the heritage behind “My Old Kentucky Home”.

You can read the write-up by NPR staff by clicking here.

Over the past few months, Walker has been touring local colleges, including Northeast State, Western Kentucky University, and Tuskegee University.

You can find out more information by visiting his website.

“Lowering” by Patty Paine

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Leaving hour, how quick
it came. The train echoed
across the valley, over Tickfaw Creek,
trembled the ryegrass at the edge
of town, then further
still, beyond Black Mountain
clear to strange weather.
Now, six days from land
the compass has gone out of me.
These cursed waves thrash
like thieves, and what a mockery
of song the wind is making. Dearest,
the sea is another tongue
for loss, for misery, for coffin.
For grief: the rusty hinge of it,
the knife stab sudden of it.

–Patty Paine,
Grief & Other Animals
(Accents Publishing)

Patty Paine is the author of The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse(Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, The Louisville Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor ofDiode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is interim director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

“Don’t Call Him Ishmael” by Frank X Walker

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Hard time didn’t make Brother wiser
like it did Etheridge Knight.
He returned home from prison
with a pocket full of excuses, not poems.

You’d thought he’d read Moby Dick
while on lock down, the way he chased
great whites, each encounter separating him
like Ahab from his leg, first from his own
children and eventually from himself.

Regret is for families forgiving enough
to break their own promises,
not realizing that even if the harpoon
is made of love, it can still drag
the whole boat down with the whale.

We might have understood revenge
and even obsession, but addiction
is more unforgiving than the sea.

–Frank X Walker,
About Flight
(Accents Publishing)

Multidisciplinary artist and Danville, Kentucky native, Frank X Walker, is the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky, and Professor in the department of English and the African American and AfricanaStudies Program at the University of Kentucky. The founding editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture is a Cave Canem Fellow, co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets, and the author of seven collections of poetry including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, winner of the 2014 NAACP Image Award for best poetry collection. The Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry recipient is the originator of the word, Affrilachia, and wholly committed to deconstructing and forging a new definition of a pluralistic Appalachia.

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